Introducing PolicyMap’s Affordability Series: New Data on the Cost of Living in America

PolicyMap centralizes and expands its household cost data to help you track cost-of-living pressures by location.

The Cost of Everyday Life Is Climbing Nationwide

Affordability has become a defining issue for American households. Rent, electricity, food, and everyday activities have all gotten more expensive, and the pressure is showing up everywhere, from kitchen table budgets to local and national elections. Understanding these costs at the local level is essential. That’s where PolicyMap can help.

PolicyMap’s Current Data on Affordability

PolicyMap’s expansive data library already offers timely, validated, and specific geographic data on many of these categories. We offer analysis-ready data, at the most granular geographic level possible, in the biggest categories of household expenditures:

• Housing
  • Median rent
  • Housing costs for owners
  • Housing costs for renters
  • Housing utility costs
  • Property taxes
  •  Home insurance
• Transportation costs
  • Percentage of income spent on transportation
• Childcare
  • Childcare cost as a percentage of median family income
• Food
  • Amount spent on food per household
• Medical Care
  • Out-of-pocket healthcare costs

Two Challenges with Today’s Affordability Data

While PolicyMap’s library offers users wide flexibility to investigate, analyze, and combine these indicators according to their own use cases, the current offering has two limits:

1. Fragmentation: Users who want to look holistically at household costs in a particular geography are faced with finding and analyzing dozens or hundreds of indicators across our menus, depending on what their precise interests are.
2. Gaps in household cost center data: PolicyMap’s offerings are missing granular data in key areas, especially health insurance, costs of cars, and disaggregated utility data.

A New Approach to Cost of Living Data

To better support researchers, policymakers, journalists, and practitioners grappling with how broad-based inflation translates to geography-specific household budgets, PolicyMap will be releasing a series of data products that centralize and enhance our data offerings on household finances. The goal of our Affordability Series is to bring our cost of living data together in curated packages, centralizing disparate sources and adding custom calculations that speed time-to-insight.

What’s Included in the Affordability Series

The PolicyMap Affordability Series will be composed of multiple data products:

• New data sources filling gaps in categories of household expenditure, such as cost of car repairs, household electricity, and gas costs
• An Affordability Data Package that will bring all related indicators into a single package and menu in the PolicyMap application
• A PolicyMap Household Budget Estimate that combines estimates of the most significant household costs into one place, where the resulting data will include a geographically varying estimate of what a “standard basket” costs for a household in a given area
• Custom indicators, such as the household budget as a fraction of household income, built by using the Household Budget or component indicators and a localized Housing Price to Income ratio.

The First Release: The Income Distribution Index

These products will be steadily released over the coming months, and the first product in this series is available now. The Income Distribution Index uses household income data from the American Communities Survey to characterize counties based on the relative predominance of lower- or higher-income bands. We think it will complement raw measures of income as well as elucidate common measures of inequality such as the Gini Coefficient. You can read more about it here.